Dynamics of Engineering Education: Creativity and Innovation through Design

Dear Colleagues,

Creativity and innovation are crucially important skills needed to tackle the rapid societal changes and emerging problems of the modern world. Despite the great demand for creative and innovative engineers, these words are typically not often used to characterize this occupation. In other words, there is a disconnect between creativity, innovation and engineering. Engineering education is believed to be one of the root causes of this divide, as it focuses primarily on technical knowledge and neglects creative thinking and skills. However, engineering education provides the best opportunity to foster creative and innovative engineering students. Design is considered to be the bridge connecting creativity, innovation and engineering. Some engineering programs have increased the proportion of design activities carried out to cultivate students’ creativity capabilities. However, conventional creativity tools, such as brainstorming and mind mapping, remain dominant in design projects, limiting the students’ creative potential. In addition, students often find these methods to be “time-consuming”, “useless” and “cumbersome”. It is, therefore, necessary for engineering, design and pedagogy researchers to address this issue so engineering students’ creativity can be fostered, preparing them to be innovative engineers.

This Special Issue seeks research studies supporting creativity and innovation in engineering education through design activities. Innovative contributions focusing on conceptual, theoretical and empirical aspects are all welcome. Topics include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Creativity and innovation in engineering education;
• Best practice of creativity and innovation teaching/learning;
• Creativity tools for students;
• Utilization of digital technologies;
• Design activities in engineering programs;
• Toolkits for enhancing creativity;
• Personalized teaching and learning ;
• New pedagogy of engineering education.

Dr. Ji Han
Dr. Pingfei Jiang
Dr. Liuqing Chen
Guest Editors

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